"If I wanted it fast, I'd write it in C" - That's almost a
direct quote from the original awk page.

"I thought of a way to do it so it must be right" - That's
obviously PHP. (laughter and applause)

"You can build anything with NAND gates" - Any language
designed by an electrical engineer. (laughter)

"This is a very high level language, who cares about bits?" -
The entire scope of fourth generation languages fell into this…
problem.

"Users care about elegance" - A lot of languages from Europe
tend to fall into this. You know, Eiffel.

"The specification is good enough" - Ada.

"Abstraction equals usability" - Scheme. Things like that.

"The common kernel should be as small as possible" -
Forth.

"Let's make this easy for the computer" - Lisp. (laughter)

"Most programs are designed top-down" - Pascal. (laughter)

"Everything is a vector" - APL.

"Everything is an object" - Smalltalk and its children.
(whispered:) Ruby. (laughter)

"Everything is a hypothesis" - Prolog. (laughter)

"Everything is a function" - Haskell. (laughter)

"Programmers should never have been given free will" -
Obviously, Python. (laughter)

So my psychological conjecture is that normal people, if they
perceive that a computer language is forcing them to learn theory,
they won't like it. In other words, hide the fancy stuff. It can be
there, just hide it.